


At the Doorstep

by FrivolousSuits



Category: Suits (US TV)
Genre: Canon Divergence, Depression, Drug Use, Episode: s8e16 Harvey, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-28
Updated: 2019-02-28
Packaged: 2019-11-06 23:59:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17949668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrivolousSuits/pseuds/FrivolousSuits
Summary: When Harvey runs frantically from the office and hails a cab, he doesn’t end up at Donna’s doorstep.





	At the Doorstep

Harvey hesitates at the door, hands balled up in his pockets. When he lifts one to knock, it wavers, and he closes his eyes and lets all the air seep from his lungs, and turns to walk back down the street–

The lock clicks open, and Harvey nearly trips off the Craftsman-style porch.

“Harvey? Why the hell are you–”

“I was in the neighborhood,” he quips, the words grating, low and gravelly. The minute he turns back around gets a good look, the next embarrassing joke slips out: “You look lousy.”

Mike’s brow tightens up, casting even more shadows across his face. Though it’s dark outside and the light inside the house is dim, Harvey can see wrinkles he doesn’t remember, and slivers of gray in his hair. Concern blots out Harvey’s initial shame.

Mike lets out an eerily familiar sigh. “Harvey, if you’re here to save me you don’t have to. It’s my own damn mess.”

“Save you from what?” Harvey lifts his chin. His voice rises too, drifting higher and lighter of its own volition, the way he used to sound naturally in another lifetime. “What do you need?”

Mike’s eyes narrow. “Why are you here?”

“I don’t know.”

It’s the truth– his whole truth now, flimsy and ugly and unsatisfying, and he doesn’t have the energy left to hide it. Up comes the chatter in his head, the whispering doubts that have always crept up to fill the silence, that have grown wild in the loneliness left by–

“That makes two of us,” Mike snorts, tone too flinty for a joke.

“I can leave,” Harvey blurts after a dawdling pause. “If you need me to. If you’re busy, if you’re going to meet a client . . .”

“Or you don’t need a washed-up fraudster decorating your doorstep” goes unsaid.

“No,” Mike exclaims in turn. “I was just. Rachel doesn’t want me in the house.”

“Excuse me?”

“Not in general, though– she doesn’t want the smell.”

Harvey tilts his head, curious.

Mike pulls his hand out of his own hoodie pocket to reveal a joint, and Harvey melts into a chuckle. “It’s legal here, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it’s the main reason I sleep at night. Wanna go to the backyard?”

“Don’t mind if I do.”

* * *

 

“How are you?” Mike says after his first long puff. He sits on one side of a two-person swing, cast-iron with cushions, the joints creaking as he sways back and forth. Harvey sits on the edge of a chair a few feet away. His elbows are propped on his knees as he leans forward, hands fidgeting, feet subtly shifting on the AstroTurf.

“Me? I’m great.”

He laughs, already loosened up. “Yeah, but how are you _doing_?”

“No complaints.”

Mike shoots him a sardonic look; Harvey knows this, though he can’t see it. “I’m not nearly high enough to believe that.”

“Huh.”

Mike reaches out; Harvey can see the embers at the end of the joint flickering in the cool dark, and he takes the joint, hands brushing together. As he brings it to his mouth, Mike relaxes back into the swing. “What are you doing here, Harvey?”

“I walked out of the office last night and hailed a cab for JFK.”

“But why?”

“Robert got disbarred.”

“He . . . what?”

“He laid down his life for the firm, but it was nearly me.”

Mike’s silent, their conversation still broken from its usual patter.

“I wanted it to be me.”

He hands the joint back.

“Why would you want that?”

The question stings. “Same reason I’m telling the guy who gave his whole life for a law license. I’m an idiot.”

He snorts at the end. Tries to play it off as humor.

“You don’t usually say that,” Mike observes.

“What can I say, I got more self-aware.”

“Harvey . . .”

Their conversation trickles to a halt again, and Harvey’s seized by the impulse to call a cab back to the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. It fades after a moment, muted by the haze of the high.

“What happened?”

What happened.

The words don’t come out right, because there are a thousand answers and Harvey can’t grasp any one of them. What _happened_ is he lost managing partnership and fell off the damn mountain after being king for a day. What happened is he tried for a couple honest cases, pro bono and all, and watched them explode in his face. What happened is he committed enough crimes to lose his license a hundred times over, he blew up the firm, he blew up his family for what’s certainly not the first time . . .

“You were right,” Harvey gets out, swallowing hard, straining to chalk his dry mouth up to the pot.

“Of course I was,” comes the blithe answer.

“Yeah.”

“About what?”

“Hm?”

“Right about what, Harvey?”

“Oh.” Harvey sifts through assorted clouds in his head before arriving at an equally jovial reply. “About how I’m not a good man. Honestly, I don’t remember the last time I was.”

“Harvey . . . When I said that at the wedding, you know I was joking, right?”

Joking?

“Forget it,” Harvey assures him. “I don’t care.”

They pass the joint again.

“Were you always this bad at lying?”

That grabs a genuine laugh out of him, and the volume surprises Harvey. “No one else noticed.”

“Yeah.”

“How about you, told any good lies lately?”

There’s a hiccup in the swing’s lilt, and regret crashes down instantly.

“A lot.” Mike’s voice sounds weary, though he still can’t meet Harvey’s gold standard.

“Can I help?”

“You don’t have to.”

“I . . .” Harvey coughs, suddenly choking on the smoke. “Yeah. Right.”

“What?” Mike asks, strangely wary.

“Don’t worry,” he grunts, because he may be old and high but he can still take a hint. “I’m not going to add to your problems.”

Mike takes another hit. “Okay. Seriously. What happened to you?”

Harvey barely hears him; he’s busy craning his neck up, wondering when all the stars disappeared.

“I don’t know," he murmurs. "Just tired of the hamster wheel.”

“The–” now Mike chokes. “The what?”

“You know. Always running, never going anywhere?”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“The firm’s a pretty cage.”

“The best,” Harvey agrees sagely.

“That’s why I left.”

“I thought it was because of the, uh. The pro bono thing.”

“Yeah.”

That was sarcasm, Harvey’s 99% sure of it, but he doesn’t know _why_.

He asks, “Didn’t you know?”

“Context, Harvey.”

“About Robert. Robert must’ve told Rachel, I thought you’d know all about it.”

“Ah.”

“Ah?”

“I thought _you_ knew.”

“Context, Michael,” Harvey says as disapprovingly as he can, but he’s sure they both break into smiles a second later.

“Well, you know how I ran out of New York for this Seattle offer outta nowhere?”

“I remember.”

“Turns out I missed a couple details. Like how Forsyth wanted to manage my managing.”

“Hm.”

“And how he only gave Rachel a job to sweeten my deal.”

“. . . Hm.”

“So we show up in Seattle for our happy-ever-after, and Forsyth doesn’t listen to a damn thing Rachel says, and she’s smart, right? She's so smart, she picks up on this faster than I do, she . . . She figures out I pulled her into a job she only got because of who she’s married to.”

“She doesn’t like that?” Harvey guesses.

“She argues it’s the worst thing I’ve done to her.”

“Including the–”

“Including the fraud.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, half because it’s polite and half because he is truly sorry for all things nowadays.

“Rachel and I, we’re taking a break.”

“From work?”

“Work, too.” Mike exhales, dropping his arm around the back of the seat, the space where another body should go. “But she’s in Iceland, and she sent me a rough draft of the papers.”

“You need an attorney?”

Mike’s raising an eyebrow, Harvey swears he can hear it. “According to precedent, Litt v. Edelstein, to win a divorce case you have to fall for the client.”

“Not a problem.”

“What?”

“What?”

Harvey waits, pulse hammering his chest, for the conversational thread to float off again.

When Mike restarts it, he mutters to the floor. ”I just don’t know where it all went to hell.”

“Me neither.”

They fall silent again, the link between them dying, and a hundred soundless dogs come to snap at Harvey.

“Standing offer,” he announces. “I said it before, just give me ten minutes, I’ll have two tickets for Buenos Aires.”

Mike laughs.

“I’m serious,” he protests. “Buenos Aires, or, or Paris.”

“Paris.”

“City of, uh.” Lovers. “Lights.”

“Harvey,” Mike says with a sigh that’s far too weighty for someone his age. “It’s not your job to keep my head on straight.”

“And vice versa. But Mike . . . I didn’t know where else to go.”

“San Diego.”

“Excuse me?”

“There’s the beach. We could surf all day and love each other all night.”

Harvey squints at him, puzzling out whether he’s joking. Then again, it wouldn't change what he says next.

“I’ll get the tickets.”

“But your firm–”

“I found a flight in two hours," he reports, glancing up from his phone.

“We should maybe sober up first.”

Harvey rolls his eyes. “Tomorrow morning.”

* * *

 

The next morning, they zip up their suitcases and walk out Mike’s door.


End file.
